Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
At an open-pit mine, blowing stuff up is just part of the daily grind. But that doesn’t mean the danger disappears. If a truck drives out onto a blast site and over a piece of explosive that failed to go off, the result could be catastrophic. But Christian Sanz, the CEO and founder of aerial drone startup Skycatch, says that at least one mining outfit is now using his quadcopters to make these sites safer.
A drone launched from a remote landing station shoots video of a blast, and mine personnel play back the video in slow motion to make sure all the charges were detonated. That, Sanz says, is just of one of a vast number of ways that Skycatch drones can open up new windows onto the landscape below through the collection of data. Skycatch doesn’t sell its drones. It leases their talent for data collection, in much the same way that cloud services from Amazon and Google rent access to computing power. Instead of managing their own fleets of unmanned aerial vehicles, he explains, companies can tap into a scalable fleet operated by Skycatch—and into the insights these extra eyes in the sky can send back to earth.
Instead of managing their own fleets of unmanned aerial vehicles, he explains, companies can tap into a scalable fleet operated by Skycatch.
Skycatch CEO Christian Sanz. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
Skycatch, like Google’s recently purchased satellite venture, seeking ways to make high-resolution, easily accessible aerial imagery a part of how the everyday world works. But for now, launching a drone is still a lot easier.
Unlike metaphorically-named cloud services, using Skycatch drones isn’t as simple as spinning up virtual machines over the internet. Someone still has to bring the drones and landing stations to a customer’s physical location. But once the hardware is set up, the idea is that you can use the drones over the web, or from your phone, without leaving your office. Instead of drones as a toy or novelty, Skycatch is seeking a way to make drones a deeply practical part of how the business world operates, starting with heavy industries that can use aerial photographs to learn a lot about the work they do. The way drones will evolve, Sanz says, is through entrepreneurs like himself who can figure out the most valuable uses for on-call flying machines. Call it drones as a service.
A Data Business, Not a Drone Business
Sanz says he got the idea while hanging out at a construction site, where workers were using their personal iPhone cameras from the ground as de facto data-collection tools. Like a lot of techies in Silicon Valley, he had long enjoyed hacking drones. He liked to tinker with the software they used to fly themselves, and at one point, he helped organize the popular DroneGames competition at the Maker Faire, the Valley’s premier festival of DIY geekitude. But he also believed that drones could be used for more than just fun, and he got a chance to prove it when the construction site’s superintendent asked a favor. Could drones take an aerial photo of the site, the superintendent asked, so he and his colleagues could track their progress?
Sanz took up the challenge, and it turned into a good two weeks of work, as the builders kept requesting new photos. A logistics manager, for instance, wanted to track the size of stockpiles to see when deliveries were made. Then, Sanz says, people started getting “lazy,” asking for photos they probably could have taken on their own. “It just became more efficient to be able to stay at their desks and see the imagery and just continue working,” Sanz explains.
‘It just became more efficient to be able to stay at their desks and see the imagery and just continue working.’
That was in January of last year. Since then, Skycatch has landed more than $16 million in funding from Google Ventures, Zappos co-founder Tony Hsieh, and other high-profile backers to pursue Sanz’s vision of drones-as-data-collection services. The company has landed major clients such as mining giant Rio Tinto and construction conglomerate Bouygues. In both of those industries, and several others, Sanz sees access to a recurrent stream of cheap aerial data as opening windows to new insights that would have been far too costly to consider obtaining by way of conventional aircraft.
Other uses at mines, he says, include monitoring for cracks that could turn into landslides and bury million-dollar pieces of equipment. Instead of sending people in person to measure slag heaps or check air quality data, a tiny drone can simply spend a few minutes in the air taking pictures. At one major construction project, Sanz says, a client is using multiple drones to track how quickly different sections of the project are moving along. These can be used, he says, to track daily progress as well as reconstruct the path of the project overall, down to minute movements of massive cranes. If someone wants to start tracking a new section or metric, the drones can be assigned new missions every day.
Much like web developers who tap online analytics tools to streamline their sites, Sanz uses the language of the cloud to describe Skycatch’s usefulness to the thousands of projects undertaken by global construction conglomerates. “If we could help optimize all of these construction sites around the world, that’s really our business,” he says. “We’re a data business, not a drone business.”
No Human Intervention
Skycatch primarily makes its money by charging for access to the data it collects and dashboards that use custom algorithms to glean insights from all those pictures. But developing new hardware is also an essential part of its business. At that first construction site, demand became so heavy, Sanz says, that he couldn’t keep up with flying the drone himself. That led to the development of standalone ground stations, landing platforms that can swap out the rechargeable batteries on the drones and download the data they collect. Radio beacons guide the drones down into the ground stations, where trapezoidal frames attached to the bottom of each drone settle into cone-shaped landing zones.
As long as they have a power source, the drones can take off and land indefinitely without direct human intervention.
Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
The ground stations are key to scaling drones as a data-collection tool, Sanz says. As long as they have a power source, the drones can take off and land indefinitely without direct human intervention. And it’s this automation that could turn them into a service that companies can use rather than maintaining their own expensive toys. Longer term, Skycatch is working on larger, fixed-wing gliders to gather high-altitude data on agriculture—drones that stay aloft for long periods of time riding thermals. While the data that its drones collect now is mostly visual, Sanz says, the future will likely also include data gathered using other kinds of sensors. For example, he says, Skycatch has had chats with one company that wants to use its drones to detect radiation. “That’s a perfect example of where you want to send a robot, not a human,” he says.
Federal Aviation Administration guidelines bar the commercial use of drones. But Sanz says that, so far, regulators have not tried to shut down any Skycatch projects, and that the company has had constructive talks with the FAA to keep its drones airborne. He points out that at large industrial sites, far more dangerous objects could fall from high places than a small quadcopter. “These are keeping people safer because it’s preventing them from going out there into areas that are actually really dangerous.”
That argument may or may not up at the FAA, but if Skycatch can avoid any regulatory backlash, its aerial drones can indeed provide a new prospective on what we’re doing down here on the ground. As anyone who’s ever flown in a plane knows, things look a lot different from up there. With help from Sanz and company, a lot of us will be able to get that view without having to go anywhere.
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